Five products can listen to the same customer call and produce five very different kinds of value.
One builds a searchable record. Another joins the conversation as an agent. A third treats the call as an event inside the CRM. A fourth watches the screen as well as listening to the audio. A fifth is designed to help the person in the meeting prepare, respond, and carry the work forward.
That distinction matters because "AI meeting assistant" has become an unhelpfully broad label. Comparing products by whether they offer transcription, summaries, or action items no longer tells you much. Most serious tools now cover at least part of that list.
The better question is: what job do you need the AI to own?
The category has moved beyond note-taking
The market changed quickly in 2026. Fathom began testing a bot-free desktop experience with live summaries. Otter added a voice-enabled agent that can respond and initiate tasks during a Zoom call. Attio brought live transcripts, AI insights, and conversational actions inside its CRM. Cluely expanded the idea of live assistance beyond the transcript to include what is visible on screen.
These products now overlap, but they still begin from different centers of gravity. That starting point shapes the interface, the data model, who receives the value, and what happens after the meeting.
Use the following comparison as a workflow map, not a universal ranking. Feature availability can vary by platform, plan, account, and rollout stage.
| Tool | Primary job | How it attends | Strongest live value | What it does after the call |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Fathom | Meeting capture and searchable team memory | Bot-based experience, plus a newer bot-free desktop beta for eligible Mac users | Live summary in the newer desktop experience | Recordings, transcripts, summaries, action items, meeting search, CRM and workflow integrations |
| Otter | AI meeting agent and collaborative transcript | Otter Notetaker joins supported meetings | Live transcript, AI Chat, and voice interaction on supported Zoom accounts | Summaries, action items, slide capture, shared notes, email and calendar assistance |
| Attio | CRM-native conversation intelligence | Attio recorder joins Zoom, Google Meet, or Teams | Real-time transcript and insights, plus Ask Attio in the call context | Calls, insights, tasks, updates, and follow-up stay connected to CRM records |
| Cluely | Private, screen-aware real-time assistance | Desktop overlay listens locally and can remain out of screen shares | Answers based on audio, screen, chat, files, and custom instructions | Meeting notes, transcripts, next steps, insights, and follow-up drafts |
| Caspi | Personal meeting performance and execution | No meeting bot; a private desktop panel captures system audio locally | Preparation, live recap, suggested questions, coaching, contextual flags, and on-demand answers | Reviewed actions can become tickets, messages, documents, CRM follow-ups, and persistent meeting memory |
Fathom: a strong meeting record that is becoming more immediate
Fathom's historical strength is turning calls into recordings, summaries, clips, action items, and a searchable source of team knowledge. Its Account-Wide Ask Fathom experience can search across a user's meetings and, on eligible team plans, a broader set of company calls. Its integrations can also send structured meeting information into systems such as Salesforce, HubSpot, Slack, and Zapier.
It would now be inaccurate to describe Fathom as purely post-call. The company's 2026 product updates describe a beta desktop experience with bot-free capture and live summaries. However, Fathom's deeper product identity still centers on the meeting record: capture the conversation well, make it easy to revisit, then distribute what was learned.
Choose Fathom when the recurring pain is, "We have too many calls and cannot reliably find, share, or reuse what was said."
Otter: the agent that can participate in the meeting
Otter has moved furthest from passive transcription toward a meeting participant. Its core product still provides live transcripts, collaborative notes, summaries, action items, and automatic slide capture. The more distinctive development is Otter AI Chat with voice, a real-time agent for Zoom that can answer questions, create action items, prepare an email, or generate a calendar event.
There are practical qualifications. Voice Chat requires the Otter Notetaker to join the Zoom meeting, and Otter says the feature is not yet available to every account. Calendar and email actions may also prepare a link or draft for human review rather than completing the final send automatically.
Choose Otter when a shared transcript matters and you want an AI agent that participants can explicitly address during the call.
Attio: the call as a first-class CRM object
Attio is the clearest example of why product category matters. It is not primarily a standalone meeting assistant with a CRM integration attached. It is a CRM that understands calls.
Attio's recorder joins supported video meetings, produces a real-time transcript, and connects the recording to the relevant workspace records. Teams can apply custom insight templates for sales, success, recruiting, fundraising, or other workflows. According to Attio's current documentation, Ask Attio can use call context to answer questions and take action, while the broader CRM already knows the people, company, history, and pipeline around the conversation.
That makes Attio unusually coherent for revenue teams already living in Attio. It may be a less natural choice if the main outcome of meetings belongs in engineering, product, documentation, or several systems outside the CRM.
Choose Attio when the meeting is valuable because it changes a customer relationship, a deal, or a CRM workflow.
Cluely: broad real-time assistance from audio and screen context
Cluely begins with a different premise: the assistant should understand not only the conversation, but also what the user is seeing and doing. Its desktop interface can answer questions using screen, audio, chat, uploaded knowledge, and a custom system prompt. Cluely's documentation also describes an invisibility setting that can keep the interface out of screen-sharing software, the taskbar, and notifications.
After a listening session, Cluely produces meeting notes, transcripts, insights, and drafted next steps. That gives it meaningful post-call utility. Still, its center of gravity is the private, general-purpose assistant beside the user, not a shared company archive or a CRM-native record.
Choose Cluely when the hard part is getting an immediate answer from a mixture of spoken and on-screen context, including work that may happen outside a conventional meeting.
Caspi: the full loop from preparation to execution
Caspi is built around the individual professional's performance across the entire meeting cycle.
Before a call, it can prepare a briefing from the calendar, previous meetings, and connected tools. During the conversation, it maintains a live recap, suggests questions, tracks commitments, surfaces proactive contextual flags, and provides coaching. On supported plans, Lifeline can produce a usable answer when the user is put on the spot, while the screenshot copilot can reason about visible material.
Caspi does not join the meeting as another participant. It captures system audio locally and works as a private floating panel across meeting platforms. Its screen-share privacy mode keeps that panel out of a shared screen on Zoom, Google Meet, and Microsoft Teams.
The post-call design is equally important. Caspi drafts actions for review, then can create the approved work in tools such as Linear, Jira, GitHub, Notion, Slack, Microsoft Teams, HubSpot, Salesforce, and monday.com. It can check for already-covered work before creating a duplicate, and it carries meeting outcomes into persistent, searchable memory.
Choose Caspi when the recurring pain is, "I need to walk into the meeting informed, perform well while it is happening, and leave with the resulting work already moving."
Four questions will make the choice clearer
Do not begin a trial by counting features. Run one real workflow through these questions:
- Who needs the value? A shared team archive points toward Fathom or Otter. A CRM-centered revenue team may get more leverage from Attio. A private individual assistant points toward Cluely or Caspi.
- When is the expensive moment? If the cost appears later, when nobody can find a decision, prioritize memory. If the cost occurs live, when someone misses an objection or lacks an answer, prioritize real-time assistance.
- Where must the work land? A summary in an inbox is different from a CRM update, an engineering ticket, a follow-up message, or a durable cross-tool memory.
- Should the assistant be visible in the room? A bot can provide a clear shared presence and collaborative access. A local assistant can reduce meeting friction and keep the interface private.
One ethical point applies to every option. A bot-free product or an overlay hidden from screen share changes the interface, not the responsibility to handle consent, recording notice, and sensitive information appropriately. Teams should set those expectations explicitly.
The useful comparison is no longer "Which AI takes the best notes?" It is "Which part of the meeting workflow should AI improve?" Fathom, Otter, Attio, and Cluely each offer a credible answer. Caspi is built for people who want that answer to span preparation, live performance, and execution after the call.